In Short: 100-Gbit/s Laser; IBM’s Quantum Computer

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The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., will field-test a laser capable of transmitting 100 gigabits of data per second beginning in January.

The laser has already been tested within the lab’s internal testing facilities. Now, the lab plans to beam the laser from a site on the lab’s roof to the summit of Mount Diablo, approximately 25 miles away. The infrared laser will be tested during a variety of atmospheric conditions and times of day, to measure the degradation of the data rates, the Oakland Tribunereported.

A spokeswoman for the federally funded laboratory confirmed the project.

The experiments are part of the lab’s Secure Air-optic Transport and Routing Network research program, which is attempting to develop advanced technologies for wireless long-range laser communications. The near-infrared laser is considered “eye-safe” in the extremely remote chance a hiker happens to intersect its beam.

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Researcher’s at IBM’s Almaden research facility in San Jose lined up a billion-billion custom-designed molecules in a test tube to become a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the mathematical problem at the heart of many of today’s data-security cryptographic systems.

In Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature, a team of IBM scientists and Stanford University graduate students reported the first demonstration of “Shor’s Algorithm” — a method developed in 1994 by AT&T scientist Peter Shor for using the futuristic quantum computer to find a number’s factors — numbers that are multiplied together to give the original number. The algorithm is primarily used in cryptography, seen as the primary application of quantum computers.

A quantum computer gets its power by taking advantage of certain quantum properties of atoms or nuclei that allow them to work together as quantum bits, or “qubits,” which serve simultaneously as the computer’s processor and memory.

IBM chemists designed and made a new molecule that has seven nuclear spins — the nuclei of five fluorine and two carbon atoms — which can interact with each other as qubits, be programmed by radio frequency pulses and be detected by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments similar to those commonly used in hospitals and chemistry labs. The atoms correctly identified “3” and “5” as the factors of the number “15”.

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Via Technologies Inc. announced the introduction of the new VIA C3 933MHz processor. This is the third speed grade of the Ezra core VIA C3™ processor, which debuted at 800MHz and is built on the advanced 0.13-micron core.

The 933MHz VIA C3 processor is in volume production now. Pricing information is available on request, the company said.

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